Ian J. Barrow[1]
This paper is an inquiry into a prominent, yet understudied, epistemological strategy for understanding India. Cartography, the scientific representation of land, was, and certainly still is, an indispensable tool in the acquisition of knowledge about India: Population densities, railway systems, rainfall patterns, etc., may be furnished by a map. Yet however innocuous the map may seem, the history of cartography in India reveals two general points: Firstly, that map-making was imbricated with other colonial modes of knowing and methods of control, or, in other words, that it was complicit in the practices of subjugating space by its transformation into place. And secondly, that shifts in cartographic methods and ontology, or notions concerning the reality of 'India', as expressed via the map reflected, perhaps even directed, similar movements in the ways colonial authors thought of India as an abstract entity. The widespread belief, for example, that India was, to borrow a phrase from Metternich, a 'geographical expression' with 'natural' boundaries can only be understood with reference to colonial cartographic practices and attitudes towards India. This essay, then, will investigate the ways in which cartography served a colonial endeavor for understanding India, but, more presciently, it will seek to demonstrate that, from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, changing notions of what the Frontier meant to the surveyors had ramifications in how, during that period, India was conceived of by both cartographers and their audience.
This essay's argument will focus on three phases of Indian cartography: The late 18th century, when frontiers were porous and largely undelimited, when the route survey served as a penetrative tool and as a facilitator to expansion beyond a frontier; the first half of the 19th century, when trigonometric practices served both to extend the base line through a frontier and scientifically consolidate information on interior locations; and thirdly, the latter half of the 19th century and the first two decades of this century, when the cartographers' bureaucracy, the Survey of India, was established and notions of protective and natural boundaries surrounding India were taken as axiomatic. The paradigmatic shift posited is that while early surveyors conceived of the 'line' as connecting two points (the line being the route survey or the extension of the trigonometric base line), later cartographers increasingly considered the 'line' as dividing two areas. This transition, however, did not necessitate a complete elision of the earlier conception of a connecting line.
Ainslee Embree has echoed early 20th century authors who saw, in the scientific demarcation of the North-West Frontier boundary, for example, a sharp disjunction between earlier amorphous frontiers and the modern boundaries which predicate nation states.[2] Beginning with the supposition that India, as a nation state, has 'natural' boundaries, Embree argues that the East India Company acquisition of territory, or "movement," as he calls it, "up the Gangetic plains to Punjab, and then to the mountain ranges beyond the Indus, and, in the northeast, towards Tibet and Burma, can be seen as a search for a permanent and viable frontier."[3] Matthew Edney, in a recent dissertation, presents the same rationale for conquest: that expansion was necessary in order to establish secure boundaries, or, to put it otherwise, that the Flag followed cartographic Truths. "Whatever the opinion of the Directors and politicians in London," he writes,
the Company expanded in India almost by necessity; territorial growth was the imperial equivalent of commercial expansion dictated by the political economies of the day. Few, if any administrators, argued that a state was an organism that must grow to survive, but all understood the logic, if not the need, to subdue peripheral areas so that the core domains might be made more secure. [4]
Such arguments not only naturalize the Company's conquests and make it appear that expansion was teleologically legitimate, but they suggest that India only became a modern nation when its natural boundaries were secured, implying that modern cartography, with one stroke of the pen, dispelled medieval notions of a fractured, incomplete India.
An alternate reading of the Survey's literature suggests that while late 19th century surveyors were proud of accurately fixing boundaries, earlier methods of surveying, and, significantly, 'outmoded' conceptions of the land and people were, with modifications, still current. The Map was not a static, completely synchronic entity -- it was a palimpsest of sorts: Etched in its conception, creation and presentation were previous journeys and their maps. Even at the turn of the last century, when the Survey of India was tanning itself in the sun of public approbation for scientifically demarcating, and therefore creating, Afghanistan,[5] the 'romance' in the Survey was derived from the use of 'native explorers' in Tibet. Employing methods outdated eighty years previously, and with missions to resolve eighteenth century geographical conundrums, the 'Pundits' publicly enacted in a 'closed' and 'lost' world a bizarre combination of Victorian fantasies for 'native' loyalty, amateurish exploration and scientific enlightenment. The point is that while the period covered witnessed epistemological and ontological shifts, they, like the palimpsest, are built upon and incorporate previous workings and conceptions of India and of frontiers. Erasures, like additions, are neither arbitrary nor complete, and so this paper will also seek to clarify the policies of transition and the contradictions within the Indian survey departments.
The literature on the Survey of India is effusive in its praise for the pioneering surveyors of India. The 1760's, which saw the first systematic route surveys in India and, later, the publication of Rennell's map of India which incorporated his own surveys, seemed to usher in a new era. The new maps were authoritative not simply because they contained greater information, but also because they incorporated the principles of scientific cartography with personal experience. Maps which relied solely on travelers' descriptions, or which contained information which was uncorroborated, were passé. However, it would be imprudent to posit a radical disjunction between Enlightenment (and even, or perhaps especially, medieval) cartographers and India's first colonial surveyors. While the parameters of this paper do not permit me to focus in detail on Western or Mughal cartographic practices and ontologies prior to the 1760's, a brief discussion is nevertheless germane. A comparison and selected analysis of three pre-colonial European and Mediterranean texts will reveal a medieval pre-supposition that difference could be viewed on a linear spectrum.
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Mandeville's Travels, and Jordanus' Journals, are each probing for ways to articulate either the unimagined or the undiscovered: all are searching for a vocabulary and methodology with which to reveal what lies hidden. This paper will argue that one of the techniques used for making the revelation plausible was to describe a world of polarities, a world in which the further the traveler went from known lands (the Mediterranean basin) the more bizarre and antipodean the inhabitants became. This journey away from the familiar is especially apparent in the Periplus, a systematic description of the countries surrounding the Erythraean Sea, or Indian Ocean. The narrative begins at the Egyptian port of Mussel Harbor, and proceeds to describe, in geographical order, the meteorological conditions and trade possibilities of various localities and their entrepots. As the author moves away from Egypt, and as the quantity of commercial information diminishes, the physiognomy and practices of the inhabitants are accentuated. While, for example, the market-town of Muza, or Mocha, is described as "crowded with Arab ship owners and seafaring men, and is busy with the affairs of commerce,"[6] the lands just before the Ganges River are inhabited by "many barbarous tribes, among them the Cirrhadae, a race of wild men with flattened noses, very savage; another tribe, the Bargysi; and the Horse-faces and the Long-faces, who are said to be cannibals."[7] Jordanus also reserved his most colorful writing for lands he had not seen, asserting that there were islands "in which are men having the head of dogs, but their women are said to be beautiful."[8] A taxonomy is constructed in these descriptions, whereby the inhabitants of areas that remain unknown (in the sense that knowledge of them remains speculative rather than empirical) are classified as antipodean.
Although the three travelers do not survey the land scientifically -- theirs are more works of the imagination than factual descriptions -- they nevertheless serve as precursors to the early colonial surveyors. Apart from a desire to relate what hitherto lies concealed by employing rhetorically generated classificatory schemes, the medieval writers locate types of people relationally. Thus, not only do the most hideously deformed live in areas that have remained unvisited, they live farthest away, as do those with virtually unspeakable practices. Jordanus, for example, wrote that in Greater and Lesser India[9] "men who dwell a long way from the sea, under ground and in woody tracts, seem altogether infernal, neither eating, drinking, nor clothing themselves like others who dwell by the sea."[10] It will be argued that it is precisely this linearity of perspective that informs not only the work of 18th century surveyors, but that of contemporary writers on India as well.
Medieval travelers were influential to early survey techniques and attitudes in several ways. First, as Greenblatt had noticed, early colonialists had to overcome a problem of representation: how to credibly recount their journeys to an audience that had been told about the Orient by authors who had never even visited many of the peoples or places described (in fact, Mandeville, himself, was a fiction, and it is debatable how far the author of the Periplus traveled, since the Ptolemaic conception of India is left unchallenged). Greenblatt suggests that early colonialists retained the medieval tropes of Oriental marvels in an effort to add credibility to their narratives: "To affirm the 'marvelous' nature of the discoveries is . . . to make good on a claim to have reached the fabled realms of gold and spice."[11] Thomas Pennant published his View of Hindostan in 1798, yet never visited India -- in fact, many of his sources (Thomas Maurice or Arrian, for example) never saw India themselves, or if they had, as in the case of Ralph Fitch, it was over two hundred years previously. The ahistorical conception of India and the repetition of previous writings added legitimacy to his presentation.[12] Therefore, in order to convey an impression of India which would evoke an appropriate response, he merely needed to reproduce familiar conceptions of the Orient. Thus, he notes that the inhabitants living in the forests of central Sri Lanka are "as savage as the domesticated animals are in the state of nature." Living in caves or under trees, and eating only raw flesh or roots, they have no law, no religion, even no language. "The wilder sort never shew themselves; the tamer will enter some kind of commerce," but if they are not given the iron arrows they need, even the tamer savage will shoot the trader in the night.[13] This world of impenetrable darkness, rudimentary exchange rites, and irrationality, situated as far as possible from coastal civilization, is not a novel vision of the landscape and habits of an unseen land and its people, but a portrait of recognized and easily identifiable figures of speech. It would seem that William Baffin's inscription under the heading of a 1619 map is ironically apt: "Vera quae visa; quae non, veriora," -- The things that we have seen are true; those we have not seen are truer still.[14]
Second, one of the rhetorical devices used to sustain interest in the Orient was to postulate the existence of an Eastern Paradise or Prester John, a Christian King variously located in Ethiopia, India and Central Asia. Pennant, for example, affirms that it is entirely appropriate that Kashmir, "this enchanting jewel . . . this Paradise, THE REGION OF ETERNAL SPRING, should be peopled with females angelic: they are uncommonly beautiful."[15] The Kingdom of 'Prestre Johan' was, for Jordanus, to be seen in India Tertia, "the terrestrial paradise," where there are rivers to be found of gold and gems, and "true unicorns . . . having only one horn in the forehead, very thick and sharp, but short and quite solid, marrow and all."[16] While late 18th century surveyors were not so credulous as to believe that they would discover lost Christian kings and paradises, nevertheless, medieval metaphors and representations of the unrepresented retained their saliency, albeit in modified forms. What is interesting is that early colonial surveyors and writers continued to conceive of space linearly, that further inland one went the darker and more impenetrable the landscape and the more uncivilized the inhabitants became. It was common for surveyors to speak of traveling through interior country which was, for example, "alive with Bhils."[17] Captain R.B. Pemberton, special emissary to Bhutan and surveyor, noted that much of the country he journeyed through was "little removed from a state of absolute barbarism," especially those areas beyond Company control.[18]
However, although such metaphors and conceptions of reality were credible for readers, they remained incomplete: there was neither a rationale for discovery, since the existence of uncivilized peoples was anticipated, nor for exploration, except, perhaps, to 'civilize', which for 18th century surveyors was not of primary importance. Even though military and revenue authorities had a need for accurate maps,[19] one of the ways in which surveyors justified their activities was to suggest that in addition to a pragmatic need for maps, there was also a journey to survey, culminating in the discovery of something truly marvelous -- the true source of the Ganges or the putative 150 feet falls on the Brahmaputra.[20]
The first colonial cartographers of India were thus still surveying under the influence of medieval conceptions of the uncharted and its rhetorical practices of revelation. However, the maps drawn by James Rennell and his companion surveyors did introduce new attitudes towards the representation of land and frontiers, attitudes which, in the words of R.H. Phillimore, the Survey's historian, rescued the map "from the vagaries of fancy."[21] David Harvey has remarked that the reintroduction of the Ptolemaic grid, with location determined by means of latitude and longitude, stripped maps of all their medieval "elements of fantasy and religious belief, as well as of any signs of the experiences involved in their production." Maps, now imbued with the principles of Enlightenment rationality, had become, according to Harvey, "abstract and strictly functional systems for the factual ordering of phenomena in space."[22] While this essay will suggest that medieval spatial notions and cartographic practices together with contingency and contestation fashioned early colonial maps which were neither purely abstract nor functional,[23] Harvey is correct to posit that maps displayed a greater 'objectivity'. Maps, as he says, lost much of their medieval sensuous, tactile character, and instead emphasized spatial organization and rationality.[24] Nevertheless, how could maps rationally represent, in a coherent and systematic manner, anomalous revenue arrangements whereby, for example, the Company was permitted to demand revenue from certain tracts of land close to Bhutan from July to November only, at which time Bhutan once more claimed jurisdiction.[25]
One of the interesting features of the early colonial maps is that, in theory, land is seen in terms of area. Mughal maps and many pre-colonial European maps of India had depicted land in various ways: In terms of, for example, the significant buildings or towns a traveler would encounter following the map,[26] or in terms of the land's productivity (two areas with the same acreage would not be drawn to identical proportions if one area's produce was more valuable or greater than the other's).[27] Land area was thus either a space within which to travel or a location from which to extract revenue, but not a terrain which held intrinsic value from its being regarded and compared simply as an area. The 'objectification' of land by surveyors (and I use the term advisedly, since, as we shall see, there came to be several ways to objectify land) was largely a result of their ability to accurately verify a position's longitude and latitude, and then to plot the information on a map governed by certain principles of uniformity and mathematical precision.
If land came to be thought of primarily as area, capable of being mathematically compared, boundaries may then be considered 'natural', since an area must logically have its parameters if it is to constitute a place. Furthermore, the map itself no longer told a story of a journey or a visual record of productive capacity, but became, in Harvey's words, "a homogenization and reification of the rich diversity of spatial itineraries and spatial stories."[28] The map no longer presented a personal interpretation of landscape, people, length or difficulty or beauty of a journey, but became impersonal and verifiable presentations of fact. Although the surveyors aspired to present spatial facts about India in a manner that permitted the viewer the luxury of objective factual comparison with other areas or countries, what transpired belied the ideal. Individual idiosyncrasies, contestation by 'recusant' zamindars, physical and material limitations, and exigencies demanded by military and commercial route surveys, all tended to make map making as tentative and ad hoc as it was scientific. For example, James Rennell virtually had his shoulder severed in an encounter with an armed band of Sanyasis, and later, while surveying, he was challenged by a local zamindar, who
appear'd on Horseback, and with him a very great Rabble, some of them armed with Matchlocks, and the rest with Pykes and Swords, etc. Without sending me any message, he came within Call and told me that he was come to fight me. I aimed a single shot at the Mogul which, however, missed him, but killed a man close by him. This had the desired effect of making them retire to a greater Distance; but they kept us in continual alarm by sending parties into the Jungles on every side of us: During this time the Mogul remained in Sight, and sent me several insolent Messages -- one of them so full of Abuse and Menaces that I thought myself fully authorised to chastise the Messenger, which I did. The rest contained hints of his independence . . . To one of these I replied by showing the Messenger the Sepoys, Arms, Camp Equipment, by which he might be assured that we belonged to the Company, for the Mogul affected to believe that we were Robbers. After a while (he) began to apologise for his Behaviour which he imputed to his ignorance of my station and employment . . . As he acknowledged his Conviction, I desired his personal Attendance, which he declined.[29]
Such encounters -- and Rennell writes of several similar incidents -- must have affected the quality of the observations, but they must also have suggested that the survey was a journey through a frontier, or, to put it differently, that the frontier was in many ways the survey. The threat of dispossession which the survey augured and the hostile response are constant themes in survey literature; yet it is only during this early phase that there is no distinction made between safe areas and dangerous frontier zones. Moreover, residual medieval conceptions and strategies for persuading a viewer that the map was a true representation and not a simulation, contributed to a process whereby the result was, in some senses as interpretative and imprecise as earlier maps: George Everest wrote acidly that surveyors "less burdened with that weighty thing called conscience seemed to think it much more simple to draw a map and a field-book, as an indispensable prelude to drawing the salary, and leaving to after investigators the knotty difficulty of discovering the amount of agreement between these two bantlings of their imagination."[30]
While it is true that surveyors were able, for example, to locate towns with more precision and that the coastline of India assumed a vastly more recognizable shape, nevertheless, the process of creating a map involved erasures, elisions and incorporations of certain kinds of information that would be of practical use for specific purposes. It is the targeted nature of the information that allowed cartographers to claim their work was scientific, but it also resulted in the rejection of information not considered of value.
The point is this: 18th century surveyors were primarily engineers conducting route surveys of roads and rivers to facilitate troop movement, commercial communication and revenue extraction. The surveyors' perception was myopic: Their view was not panoramic, all-encompassing, but selected and limited to a road. And it was this reliance on the road for both information and a rationale for surveying which characterizes the villages, or hills, or jungles along the way as markers, as signs directing the surveyor, traveler, viewer on to the revelation at the end of the journey. Acting almost in opposition to the Ptolemaic grid into which they are placed, 'facts' are not seen as discrete objects, but, in the words of Paul Carter, "as horizons increasingly inscribed with spatial meanings, defined not in terms of objective qualities, but as directional pointers articulating and punctuating the explorer's journey."[31] The logic of the 'facts' here, therefore, is not to stand in isolation, capable of objective analysis and comparison, but to guide the traveler onwards, and it is this sense of journey beyond the observed towards the unrevealed wonder that characterizes the first colonial surveys in India. Moreover, this manner of approach towards the map and the information revealed implies that the frontier was not a boundary per se prohibiting travel, but a zone of passage: Indeed it began when the survey began and ended with its completion. The frontier, then, was the survey.
Some late 18th century maps depict the company's lands vis-a-vis its neighbors, which from a more modern perspective would seem to imply that the concept of a frontier involved an area of separation. Although this was, certainly, one definition of the frontier, the more common approach was to think of the frontier as those lands which lay unsurveyed, possessing routes of interest to the Company and traveler. Uncertainty as to what lands exactly were the Company's, constant danger from zamindar armies or Sanyasi Fakirs, and several attempts to locate the source of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers, all in addition to the belief that the surveyors' mission was not to delimit the land but to survey it, indicates that the Company's frontiers were hardly just borders.
William Lambton's Great Trigonometric Survey, begun in 1802 at St. Thomas' Mount in Madras[32] and, after his death in 1823, continued by George Everest, succeeded in measuring the length of a meridional arc, from Southern India to Dehra Dun in the North.[33] The Trigonometric Survey provided mathematically determined positions (accurate to within seconds of a degree) which served as bases and check-points for both the topographical and revenue surveys, usually operating in Native States and Company territory respectively.[34] Moreover, the Trigonometric Survey contributed to the "statistical knowledge" of India, a goal established in 1802 by Lord Wellesley when he argued that a surveyor "should not be confined to mere military or geographic information, but that his enquiries should be extended to a statistical account of the whole country."[35]
Second, surveying, and especially the scientifically precise trigonometric surveys, became increasingly associated with the colonial mission to improve India educationally, morally and agriculturally. Although surveys were not tools for direct improvement, since for many years Indian surveyors were restricted to the Revenue Department, the notion that the trigonometric survey extended a base line through a frontier suggested that the survey acted as a pioneer, enabling progress to occur. Thus in 1847, after revisiting a tract of country first surveyed twenty-three years previously, Everest wrote that "in all portions of the tract passed over by the Great Arc Series . . . the contrast exhibited by the present over the former amount of prosperity is most striking where the British power has been paramount, and is more and more marked in proportion to the influence which that power exerts."[36] However, Everest retained medieval conceptions that difference, often irreconcilable, manifested itself in oppositional terms: "The English and Hindus are the very antipodes of each other in their national characteristics: of all races on earth they present the fewest points of similarity."[37] The Trigonometric Survey, therefore, was seen as charting an entry into India's interior for the entrance of Western improvement and rationality, but due to the Department's own highly scientific nature it distanced itself from India and cultivated an objective perspective.
Despite the fact that the surveyors and the Company saw the Survey as preparing the way for India's moral and material improvement, Indian responses to the Survey's activities were unequivocally hostile. Regional kings were not unaware that surveyors' primary purpose had been, and to a large extent still was, to conduct traverses for the military. Everest concluded that nothing excited the "jealousy" of Native States "as the slightest disposition to survey and spy into the nakedness of the land, which they universally believe . . . is but a preliminary step to assuming possession."[38] There were many reports by surveyors that the arrival of a survey party always caused consternation. W.H. Sleeman noted that in Central India Everest's practice of surveying by night, when the atmosphere was clear, encouraged "the peasantry to believe that men who required to do their work by the aid of fires lighted in the dead of night upon high places, and work which none but themselves could comprehend, must hold communion with supernatural beings . . . "[39] Everest himself was often thought of as an astrologer with necromantic powers, "a notion which," he admits," it would not have been politic to discourage."[40] It is ironic, therefore, that the Survey, which was seen to presage the introduction of improving science and morality, should view its own technical nature as a marker which not only distinguished it from Indian society, but validated behavior intended to keep Indians ignorant of its intentions, practices and results.
The Trigonometric Survey was also important to Indian cartography because both Lambton and Everest considered their work to be of global importance -- the measurement of the arc would contribute to British, French and Swedish attempts to mathematically compute the exact shape of the earth.[41] For the first time, therefore, surveying India had a utility that was unrelated to Company or traveler's concerns.
Lastly, the procedure of triangulation which supplanted, much to Rennell's chagrin,[42] the less efficacious and unreliable route surveys and perambulators introduced a new objectivity into the map.[43] Surveyors meticulously chain-measured a base line of several miles (it took Everest months to measure one in Dehra Dun) and used the results to trigonometrically calculate the location and relative distances of prominent features scattered over hundreds of miles. The results were a series of triangles which ran the length of India, spawning a series of minor trigonometric surveys spreading out towards the sea. India could now be conceived of as a completely abstracted entity. From the Cape to Dehra Dun, 'India' was a composite of triangles.
The implications of such a perspective are enormous. Paul Carter draws a distinction between exploration and discovery: Whereas explorers interpret physical objects as route markers, guiding the traveler forwards, discoverers search for a body of facts which only have value within a classificatory scheme. Carter then posits an analogy between discovery and the Linnaean botanical system. Victorian botanists were attracted by the simplicity of the Linnaean system -- no examination of plant morphology was necessary, only a comparison of appearances. "The pleasure of the plant collector," he notes, "was a pleasure in naming uniquely and systematically. It was the pleasure of arrangement within a universal taxonomy, a taxonomy characterized by tree-like ramifications . . . Equipped with the artificial system of Linnaeus, novelty ceased to present a problem. Utterly strange forms became type specimens. Less curious plants might be assigned to existing genera."[44] The Trigonometric Survey, with its imposition onto India of an artificial network, permitted both the surveyor and map viewer to consider India in taxonomic terms -- once a discovery was made, either of a tribe, or of a mountain range, the inclusion of that fact into the map's classificatory grid imposed a certain rigidity and permanence: The tribe, for example, is named, located and forever known according to its abstracted, comparable characteristics.
Lambton and Everest's surveying practices also modified the meanings of the frontier. For the first time the frontier was seen as the limit of the frontier rather than as the survey itself. In the course of extending their base lines northwards, both men speak of destinations which constitute the point of the survey. In a paper announcing that he had completed a survey from latitude 15[[ring]] 6' 2" to latitude 18[[ring]] 3' 45", Lambton, for example, wrote that his "excursion into the Nizam's country was for the sole purpose of getting three degrees more to the arc, and it was with some hesitation that I entered it at all, from being apprehensive of interruption occasioned by the jealousy of the inhabitants."[45] And so rather than seeing the survey as a journey of exploration the survey is now deemed successful once a destination has been reached, and the line extended. The Frontier became a metaphor for knowledge, an area to be reached and eventually traversed, but a zone, nevertheless, demarcating what was and was not known. Towards that end, the people, buildings, land even, served a single purpose: as means of mapping. Whole villages were moved by both Lambton and Everest, long swaths of forest were cut down, and temple roofs were used as permanent survey posts.[46] Across large portions of flat country Everest constructed stone observation towers fifty feet high, with walls five feet thick.[47] While the frontier retained its porous aspect -- the base line had still to be extended beyond the frontier -- the Trigonometric Survey, especially after Everest introduced his grid-iron survey system, endeavored to treat geographical or social formations as ahistorical, but rooted and natural, facts to be included in a larger classificatory matrix.
By the end of the 19th century most of the lands under British control had been surveyed trigonometrically, and the notion of the frontier once again underwent a transformation. The frontier itself was abstracted, and thought of as a permanent, natural fixture of the landscape, becoming synonymous in common parlance with the boundary line. Surveyors and a few commentators tried to retain a distinction -- the boundary being a physical line, with the frontier as a zone of demarcation -- but even they conceived of the frontier as delimiting two areas. Even a 1942 college dictionary (Funk and Wagnalls) designates a 'frontier' as "that portion of a country between a civilized and unsettled region." Furthermore, the frontier was a natural buffer zone, protecting by means of a boundary what lay within from either uncivilized or threatening forces from without. And so "boundaries must be barriers," wrote T.H. Holdich, a retired Surveyor, "and if not geographical and natural, then they must be artificial, and strong as military device can make them."[48]
It became a common trope of colonial literature to view space around a sacred object, such as a woman, or the club, or the Imperial center, in terms of concentric circles. Whereas previously a linear spectrum was posited, whereby the most uncivilized or antipodean peoples jostled for position with a Paradise or other wonder at the farthest distance imaginable, often inland or out at sea (Ceylon or Andaman Islands), now the protective frontier either incorporated a series of barriers, or was itself a barrier protecting the center from a threatening periphery. A wonderful example is provided by Surveyor Lieut.-Col. Woodthorpe, mapping in the North-East Frontier district of South Sylhet towards the end of the 19th century. The long passage will be given in full as it is a lucid, if somewhat elegaic, example of late 19th century surveyors' notions of boundaries, `point of view' and spatial vision. "At four o'clock in the afternoon," he writes,
I am standing on a cleared hill just above a large tea garden. The air is beautifully soft and balmy, and looking to the east I see below me the gentle undulations and flat ground under tea cultivation, the rich dark green bushes standing out in bold contrast on the red-brown soil. Among the bushes the busy coolies are at work, the women adding brightness to the scene with their brilliantly coloured robes. In the midst of cultivation on the banks of a clear stream, in a small, well-kept enclosure with a pretty tank, stands the manager's bungalow, a large commodious house, with white-washed walls and lofty thatched roof, slightly hidden by tall plantain trees. Rose bushes and other shrubs flourish in the garden, in which from my elevated standpoint I can see that the useful is not overlooked in the culture of the beautiful, as testified by a corner where many tempting-looking vegetables are growing. With the orange glow of the afternoon sun upon it, the bungalow, with its garden, looks, as indeed I find it, very haven of rest, comfort, and hospitality. I hear voices behind the bungalow near some large, neat tea-houses, and, looking, I see an excellent tennis court, where an exciting contest is being carried on between young planters of this and a neighbouring garden. Beyond, the view due south is closed by the virgin dark forest of trees and feathery bamboos, the greater portion of which will soon, by the enterprise of the planters and the extension of the tea gardens, disappear. To the South-West and West the eye wanders over the plains of South Sylhet, bounded on the south by the jungle-clad hills of Tipperah, purple now and indistinct. The flat green fields, above which, as the sun sinks, soft mist wreaths float, are broken up by the frequent glimpses of reddish roofs and the light blue smoke curling upwards denote the presence of villages . . . Far away to the north beyond the plain, the trees, the villages, and the station of Sylhet itself, rises the long, level outline of the Khasia hills, faintly glowing in the sunset. A hum of voices ascends from the villages below, cows wend their way homewards through the deepening gloom, and as the sun sinks in the brown obscurity of the distant horizon, I shut up my theodolite, and running down the hillside, soon find myself at the bungalow, where a hearty welcome and an excellent dinner await me.[49]
From his position on the hill he divides the land into zones demarcated by certain barriers: thus the bungalow, the center of the picture and area of greatest domesticity, safety and practical and aesthetic cultivation, is protected by an enclosure. The relaxed and playful atmosphere of the bungalow is contrasted with the work of the coolies across the stream which separates the house from the villagers. The blocked view to the south will soon give way to a panorama of cultivated fields, while the plains of Sylhet are "bounded" by the dark and indistinct "jungle-clad hills of Tipperah." As Woodthorpe looks away from the bungalow in all directions, he paints an unproductively fecund, wild, and uninviting landscape. The whole area is itself bounded by the Khasia hills, which, although he does not mention it, were the homes to what were considered some of the most uncivilized tribes in India. The space is no longer conceived of as simply linear, but a series of nearly concentric zones of distinct cultural practice and physical appearance, all bounded by physical objects and presented as natural boundaries.
Acting as a paradigm for this new conception were the frontiers on the North-East and North-West of India. It is important to point out that these frontiers were neither single boundary lines, nor zones demarcating one area from another. They were what might be called 'complex frontiers'. That is, while an official boundary line separated Afghanistan from India (the Durand Line of 1893), or China from India, (the McMahon Line of 1914) for example, there existed an 'Administrative' or 'Inner' line behind the boundary line, but beyond which the British refused to govern.[50] Moreover, the North-West Frontier incorporated two 'Defensive' lines, one inside Afghanistan, the other the river Indus. Unfortunately, this paper does not have the scope to investigate the intricate and fascinating histories of the creation of the boundaries and administrative areas along the North-West and North-East Frontiers. However, these frontiers were complex because, in part, they were designed both to assure India the greatest possible strategic protection, and either include (as in the North-East) or exclude (in the North-West) the trans-frontier tribes. Along both frontiers the tribes proved themselves to be major irritants to the Government, and murders of officials or non-payment of rents were the pretexts for many Government `punitive expeditions', otherwise known in the North-East as perambulations, and in the North-West as `butcher and bolt' runs.[51] In the North-East, for example, the argument articulated in 1914 by the Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills was that if the Government would subsume uncivilized tribes within India, the problem of raids would disappear:
. . . we cannot hope to civilize our own half-savage peoples so long as they see raiding and head-hunting practiced by their brothers and cousins just across the border. In order to complete our mission of civilization within our own borders we must gradually extend the area which we control . . . as we extend our control the risk that punitive expeditions will be necessary steadily diminishes, in as much as complications on the frontier occur not in controlled, but in uncontrolled areas.[52]
The administrative difficulties occasioned by either the inclusion or exclusion of the tribes, and the subsequent appeals to adjust the boundary, did not, however, obviate the widespread notion that India's frontiers-cum-boundaries (remember both were usually conflated) were regarded as being completely natural: "The natural boundary of India," Lord Lytton wrote in 1879, "is formed by the convergence of the great mountain ranges of the Himalayas and of the Hindu Kush . . . (If we) consolidate our influence over this country, and if we resolve that no foreign interference can be permitted on this side of the mountains . . . we shall have laid down a natural line of frontier which is distinct, intelligible, and likely to be respected."[53] The importance of maintaining the sanctity of the frontier, especially along the Hindu Kush (`Kush' is from the Persian Kushidan, `to kill'), is revealed in the telling maxim, popular in the early 20th century, that the way to hold India was "to keep the Hindu Khush" (`happy' in Persian).[54] However, the need to convert the frontier into a defensive barrier had less to do with internal considerations than with the need to protect India from both Russia and `troublesome' frontier tribes.
Maps are made intelligible by their frontiers. This essay has charted the development from an 18th century conception of frontiers as being the map of India, to the turn of the 20th century when, despite the fact that frontiers were complex entities, they permitted the reification of the area they bounded. Perhaps the most absurd example of how India was regarded as a complete abstraction, where location needed only to be computed, is the Survey's 1928 publication The 'Where Is It? Reference Index, which did not even contain a map, but was merely a listing of place names, railway stations and tribes, and their location given in degrees of longitude and latitude.[55]
Timothy Mitchell has argued that 19th century exhibitions of the Orient had powerful notional effects. The exhibition provided an arena for viewing the Orient, and as a representation it suggested that a real Orient existed which corresponded to the exhibition. But when a traveler visited the Orient his referent was the exhibition, and thus his trip was marked by an attempt to refer the original back to the representation, as if that were the original. The map, usually a first representation of India which the traveler met with, did suggest a further reality, yet due to the fact that reality could not be conceived of in terms other than those presented in the map (i.e. as an abstract, boundary-protected entity), the map itself became a surrogate reality, even more real than the 'real'. When alluding to the `map' his book India: A Bird's-Eye View, the Earl of Ronaldshay writes that "man, in short, with his varied outlook upon the universe demands a picture of more than the mere outward appearance of things. The bird's-eye view which he requires is a mosaic of diverse pieces -- a composition of historical, pictorial, statistical, and ethnographic vignettes."[56] Often, however, `reality' did not correspond to the reality represented in the map, and so, as the Earl informs, his respect for cartographers decreased as his disappointment grew. "The lakes painted in blue," he says, "create expectations of something very different from the `gloomy swamps of reality,' and a laborious journey of 500 miles across the crude expanse of desiccated hill and scorched plain which lies between Quetta and the Persian frontier taught me to regard with grave suspicion the `refreshing oases of green and the named localities innumerable' which appear in the map. . ."[57]
The experience of the exhibition became a template, as it were, of viewing: An observer should be detached and have a 'point of view', or `a bird's-eye view'. The map was itself the ultimate detached point of view, permitting observation without being disturbed or noticed. "The problem," writes Mitchell, "for the photographer or writer visiting the Middle East . . . was not just to make an accurate picture of the East but to set it up as a picture. One can copy or represent only what appears already to exist representationally -- as a picture."[58] What is more, "the only way to grasp it representationally . . . was to grasp it as the recurrence of a picture one had seem before, or according to the lines of a map one already carried in one's head, or as the reiteration of an earlier description."[59] And it was the notion of a frontier-boundary, impregnable, permanent and protective, that permitted the map to become a stable, abstracted unity, metonymic of the real.
This essay has attempted to survey Colonial cartographic practices and beliefs in India from the 1760's to the beginning of the 20th century. The argument has focused on surveyors' notions of the frontier, and how those conceptions helped constitute land and people in the minds of the British. In rearticulating the history of colonial cartography, an effort has been made to demonstrate that contemporary and late colonial axioms regarding naturalized frontiers and protective boundaries have been historically fashioned, often for political purpose.
Early Company efforts to survey Bengal and the areas around Madras and Bombay resulted in a notion of the frontier which married scientifically generated conceptions of the frontier to previous medieval beliefs. Thus, while the frontier was to be physically located on a map, it was also a zone of travel, persuading the surveyor that the journey had a wonder to be revealed. This idea that the survey was itself the frontier, while not completely erased, was nevertheless modified when trigonometric surveys were introduced to India at the very beginning of the 19th century. William Lambton and George Everest posited a need to extend the trigonometric base line through a frontier, so that two points would be connected, yet they also envisioned a point of completion and an area which could be covered by a web of triangles. Emphasis shifted from a tactile, sensuous knowledge of the land towards a more mathematically determined and abstracted conception of India. Gradually, surveyors regarded the frontier as less a zone of passage and increasingly as a barrier, simply requiring official demarcation to transform the bounded area into a natural entity or modern nation state. Boundaries and the country they protected became `natural' geographical products. "Geography reigns supreme in India," wrote Patricia Kendall, "It dictates political boundaries, determines social movements and limits ethnical expansion."[60]
Although early 20th century surveyors fetishized the `map' in a manner which permitted the viewer to consider a completely abstracted India as natural, even as the hyper-real, they nevertheless reformulated anachronistic notions of the frontier. They employed Indians as quasi-legitimate surveyors, instructing them to map in rudimentary fashion the unknown lands beyond the northern boundary. The frontier reverted to being a zone of passage, but the journey was now vicariously experienced by surveyors and their viewers from behind safe boundaries.
Even medieval myths were once more utilized in an effort to infuse romance into the Survey's activities and, ironically, to help soften the Survey's scientific reputation. T.H. Holdich proposed that there were half truths to medieval myths, supposedly long thought of as incredible. "Without ascribing much value to the Mediaeval traditions which invested Prester John with a halo of religious romance . . . there can be no doubt that as late as the middle of the tenth century Nestorian Christianity prevailed in Central Asia to an extent which is hardly realised in the twentieth."[61] This essay has attempted to provide an alternative reading of the history of India's frontiers, and has suggested that questions of `accuracy' and quality of information had as much to do with the `painted' reproduction of established tropes as it had to do with new scientific precision.